Oracle Blog

Things on my mind.

My Own Personal Travel Hell

As I'm writing this entry it's Monday and I'm sitting on United
Airlines flight 900 from San Francisco to
Frankfurt, on route to Bangalore, India. I'm looking forward to getting
back to work with my Indian colleagues in our
partner engineering group, MDE (Market Development Engineering). The
work itself should be interesting, and I'm certain that I'm going
to have a great time with the folks in Bangalore (I had a blast last
time, and I know them a little better now). But right now I'm in travel
hell.

It's not the 21 hours of flying time, although if the company
feels pity enough on me to upgrade me to business class, I could
probably live with that.

It's not the economy class seats, which are usually too short for my
body (I'm six feet tall but most of that height is from the waist up,
which means that when I try to sleep in the seat, my head lolls over
the top of the seat like I'm some kind of nerdy rag doll). I have a
window seat today/tonight/whatever, and I'm able to lean against the
wall.

It's not flying while sick, which I almost did (originally my flight
was to leave Saturday, but I was feeling ill on Friday and Saturday
and so I changed my outgoing flight, which is why I'm flying United
instead of Lufthansa). Flying sick would've been a different kind of
hell than the one I'm experiencing now, but it might have been
preferable.

No, my friends, this is a special hell, reserved for those who carry
CompactFlash cards full of MP3's like they were Rolaids, and CD
portfolios full of DVD movies as an alternative to the bad audio in
the in-flight movie (which was "Catwoman" by the way, and even though
I am a lover of both cats and Halle Berry, the movie still sucked).

Have you guessed it yet? My own personal travel hell is that, in
economy class on United and Lufthansa both, there are no power ports
in these seats! I'm watching my battery meter trickle down from 90%
to 75% to 50% power (and by the way, when is the
Java Desktop
System
going to get power management for notebook computers?)